The best way to learn a platform is to use a platform Wow what a week it's been. First week back from vacation and I'm diving right into a sprint of stuff that needs to be delivered to the customer. My task for the week has been develop a connectivity layer between Salesforce and Dropbox using OAuth. This ...

Currency conversion in Apex While waiting for my flight in the lounge tonight I was playing around with currencies in Salesforce because - why not... Conversion between configured currencies are supported in SOQL and Salesforce but only between the configured corporate currency and ...

Salesforce week 25-27 and finishing this weekly thing... Wow!! A half year has gone by. Half a year... Where did the time go? Over the last weeks I've gradually noticed that my view on being with Salesforce has shifted from being "something new" to being "how things are". On feeling at home in the organisation ...

Salesforce Lightning Component API change As we get closer to Summer 17 we start using difference versions across production instances and sandboxes. This of course also leads to opportunities for differences in API's... I just found one such difference as I'd been developing some Lightning ...

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Re: The best way to learn a platform is to use a platformAs far as dev platforms go, I've been working with Polymer now for almost 2 years. And their tagline is "Use the Platform". Meaning, use the browser platform to do what it can do and does best whenever possible. That too goes to what you're ...

Re: Salesforce Lightning Components and image dependenciesOf course the Salesforce Lightning Design System is Salesforce agnostic but it's funny that the SLDS website only mention the SVG approach. I'll have to look into using the lightning:icon tag instead of the SVG custom component as that would definitely ...

For a customer project I'm working on these days I'm writing an event handler for IBM Connections Profiles to integrate two profile systems in real-time using the IBM Connections 4.0 Event SPI. Pretty powerful stuff in case you've never looked into it.

In IBM Connections an event handler is basically just a Java bean which you register in events-config.xml to be called when certain events occur such as a profile being updated, the photo set, the photo removed etc. In this event handler I needed to contact the Profiles database which should be easy as it's registered in JNDI in Websphere Application Server. I couldn't however use the usual java:comp/env/jdbc/profiles resource reference as there's no J2EE deployment description for the event handler and hence the naming context hasn't been mapped for me.

But with Websphere Application Server being the all-purpose application server that it is, I was able to find a way to make it work anyway. It turns out that all resources are mapped into a JNDI namespace using their cell and cluster prefix as well (I was able to deduce it from the "Example: Looking up an EJB home or business interface with JNDI" page).

So to look up the jdbc/profiles data source from the Cluster1-cluster scope I simply use the following. Sweet.

At a customer site they were actually using the IBM Connections help documents (a first I know) but it didn't work for the users in Internet Explorer. After some research it turned out to be due to a missing compatability statement in the generated HTML documents (this statement is present in HTML generated for other features). I've previously reported this issue to IBM but it still hasn't been fixed in version 4.0 CR3 so I took it upon me to find a solution. The solution turned out to be simpel using a "sledgehammer approach". I simply used one of the cool modules in IHS (Apache) to add a compatability header to force all document into IE7 mode.

Below are the steps - YMMV.

Open your httpd.conf file for edit

Uncomment the mod_headers module near the top by removing the hash-character at the beginning so the line simply reads "LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so"

At the end of the file simply paste in the following command
Header set X-UA-Compatible IE=7

It's been bothering me a while that the username and password for our LDAP user was visible in clear text in our socialmail-discovery-config.xml. After going looking for a solution by using very specific searching I found a solution where you can hide the username and password and - stupid as I am - it's actually right there in the install docs. Stupid is as stupid does. The solution is to remove the authentication data from the socialmail-discovery-config.xml and replace the <DirectoryUser> and <DirectoryPW> tags with a single <DirectoryAuthAlias> tag. This tag should reference a J2C alias configured in the Websphere ISC. Simple and effective.